Adobe Named a Leader in the Forrester New Wave for Cross-Channel Video Advertising Platforms

Today, Adobe Advertising Cloud was named a Leader in The Forrester New Wave™: Cross-Channel Video Advertising Platforms, Q3 2019. This report was based on a thorough evaluation of 13 providers across 10 criteria. Adobe received a differentiated rating, the highest score possible, in the company vision, product vision and product roadmap criteria, as well as the buying: traditional linear, and buying: set-top box criteria. We believe these differentiated criteria alongside our powerful capabilities in categories such as connected television, online video, audience discovery, and measurement, solidifies our place as a leader in the advertising industry.

“Adobe has been a great and collaborative partner with a strong focus on data and technology for cross-channel video advertising to reach real people to ultimately achieve our clients’ business KPIs,” stated Brad Stockton, VP Video Innovation of Dentsu Aegis Network.

While we’re humbled by this recognition, we know it is only through our customers that we can continuously innovate as the only independent, end-to-end platform for managing advertising across traditional TV and digital formats. By integrating audience, analytics, and activation, our unified tech stack streamlines the campaign lifecycle and delivers measurable advertising success.

Our take on where Adobe differentiates:

Buying — traditional linear

Linear still accounts for the widest reach of all television formats. With nearly $70B in projected linear TV advertising spend for 2019, we believe it is critical for our clients to be able to plan, buy, optimize, and measure against such a wide-reaching channel. While we see growth in newer formats such as addressable and CTV, Adobe believes that traditional linear television will continue to account for massive ad spend and reach, and it will continue to offer new innovations that help improve more granular buying and targeting. According to the report, Adobe was one of only two companies to receive a differentiated ranking in this category. For an advertising platform to truly offer clients a holistic, omnichannel strategy, linear must continue to be a driving force to build brands and reach the masses, and Adobe is committed to remaining a leader in this space.

Buying — set-top box

Buying against set-top boxes or “addressable television” is another area where Adobe Advertising Cloud proved uniquely differentiated. We view addressable as an excellent blend between scale and precision, offering clients a unique opportunity to capitalize on a rich format with more granular personalization than traditional linear.

Addressable is projected to absorb $2B of the US advertising spend in 2019, and Adobe offers powerful access and capabilities across its providers. With this advertising format projected to grow 44% in 2020, we are excited to be a leader in allowing our clients to take advantage of such a powerful and rapidly growing channel.

Company vision

We believe advertising should be connected. And in order to deliver on that belief, we are committed to connecting not just advertising channels, but advertising, marketing, and creative technologies, as well as the teams behind them. We are excited to have ranked as a leader in Forrester’s cross-channel video report and are even more excited when we zoom out and see that this is only one core pillar of Advertising Cloud alongside a much broader range of offerings. Connecting cross-channel video to a full array of advertising channels such as display, dynamic creative optimization, native, audio, digital out-of-home and paid search allows our clients to truly achieve an omnichannel strategy and reach users wherever they may be with the best message.

But it doesn’t stop there. Advertising reach is only half the battle, and to truly know where a user is in their buying process, and what that best message is, we connect our offering to Adobe’s industry-leading solutions around audience management, analytics, creative, and personalization. Never has the industry seen this holistic of an offering that allows a designer to create an asset, push it to a media buyer, and target it against the best audience using rich first-, second-, and third-party data in a truly differentiated way.

Product vision

The advertising industry continues to see a massive amount of transformation, and we are committed to not just helping our clients navigate that transformation, but to capitalize on it.

In 2019 the industry has been talking constantly about the importance of first-party data, both in terms of its performance against many objectives, but also its increasing importance as industry regulations and changes limit the uses of third-party data. We are committed to continue being the leader in allowing our clients to seamlessly activate their first-party data across a wide array channels and to build unique partnerships that allow them to use this data in ways which no other platform can.

This past March we announced a partnership with Roku in which Advertising Cloud is the only platform that allows advertisers to take advantage of deterministic 1:1 matching and targeting between their data and Roku’s IDs for unparalleled precision and accuracy. Our clients can access Roku’s premium inventory across the largest connected TV user base, of which 75% of are light traditional TV viewers or cord-cutters. Additionally, this allows for measurement insights into audience and campaign performance in ways never seen before.

Looking forward, Adobe Advertising Cloud will continue to pave the way for our clients to get the most out of their valuable data and audiences through unique inventory access and partnerships.

Product roadmap

On top of providing superior inventory access, we’re excited for the coming months where we will continue to innovate on planning, streamlined workflows, reporting, measurement, and attribution.

Allowing our clients to better plan their television buys across a wide range of scenarios with the click of a button will ensure our advertisers can easily identify the best media plan to reach their goals. Keep an eye out as we begin to release exciting new capabilities around this.

Additionally, we are building many new UI features to ensure our clients can build, manage and optimize their campaigns with the highest levels of efficiency and accuracy. We understand that hands-on users need to complete an overwhelming number of tasks every day to constantly keep their campaigns performing best. We are constantly speaking to our customers and to the industry to understand their top needs and build our product accordingly.

Finally, we are extremely excited about our roadmap when it comes to building further integrations across the Adobe Experience Cloud and the new Adobe Experience Platform. This integrated stack will continue to unlock new capabilities around reporting, attribution, and audience planning never thought possible.

Adobe’s goal is to empower our advertising and marketing customers to provide their audiences with connected experiences across devices. We’re excited to receive this recognition from Forrester and see it as further validation of our strategy to equip customers with powerful tools to meet their business objectives.

TV is going to get even more exciting over the next few years. The industry is going to continue to innovate on traditional buying as well as experience rapid growth on emerging formats. Savvy buyers will continue to buy linear because of reach and then pinpoint and refine their targets across a wide variety of digital inventory.

As these seismic shifts play out, our clients can rest assured that we’ll continue to lead in the space by centralizing disparate channels within a single platform that they can use to plan, buy, measure, and optimize their global advertising spend.

_Get the full complimentary report: The Forrester New Wave™: Cross-Channel Video Advertising Platforms, Q3 2019.
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To learn more about our vision, download An Advertiser’s Guide to Data-driven Advanced TV.